Beth Shapiro

Beth Shapiro is Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and Director of evolutionary genomics at the Genomics Institute at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also an Investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research aims to better understand how populations and species change through time, particularly in response to environmental and other changes to their habitat. Her group uses experimental and computational approaches to analyze genetic information isolated from fossil and archived remains. She is particularly interested in learning what drives speciation and extinction.

Shapiro has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, among other honors. She earned her Ph.D. in Zoology from Oxford University, and previously held appointments at Oxford and The Pennsylvania State University.